Step on a Crack (Michael Bennett 1)

“You still want to fight them?” Rooney said.

Conlan nodded calmly, and Rooney did a double take at the star’s patented steely-eyed squint. In real life Charlie Conlan seemed to be an even bigger badass than the rock-and-roller persona that had made him famous around the world.

“Yo,” whispered a voice behind them. Source magazine–dubbed “Bubblegum Ho” Mercedes Freer, who’d been released from the confessional the night before, sat up from where she’d been sleeping.

“You bad boys gonna try something?” she said.

Rooney debated letting her in on it, then finally nodded. “Just being prepared.”

“Amen to that shit,” the singer said. “Check it. One of those g’s is into me. He was talking to me through the confessional door last night. Skinny one with the shotgun, sitting in the middle up there. Yo, we could use that. I could play like I want to do him or something.”

Just then, Little John arrived from the back of the chapel with a cooler and a cardboard tray of coffees.

“Rise and shine, campers,” he yelled as he came up the aisle. “Asses in the seats. It’s chow time.”

A sudden booming, sustained sound started from Reverend Solstice three rows behind Rooney. At first, he thought the black minister was having a heart attack. But the sound turned into a note and soared, and Rooney realized that the man was singing.

“ ‘Ahhhhhhhhhhmayzing grace, how sweeeeet the sound.’ ”

Reverend Sparks, sitting next to Solstice, started singing a kind of backup.

Rooney rolled his eyes. How absurd was this?

But after a while, even he could see that the impassioned voices of the two men seemed to infuse a soothing warmth into the cold church. Other people began to join in, and when Rooney saw Little John shake his head in disapproval, he began singing along, too.

It got even more shocking when Mercedes Freer stood afterward and started singing “Silent Night.” Rooney’s mouth gaped at the pure classical beauty in the girl’s voice. The foul-mouthed tart could have been a soloist in an opera.

“ ‘Sleep in heavenly pe-eace,’ ” she sang. “ ‘Slee-eep in heavenly …’ ”

The explosive, crisp snap of a gunshot replaced Mercedes’s last note. There was a rumbling as everyone turned back in the pews toward the larger church—where the shot had come from.

The chilling reverberation of the shot pressed some reset button in the core of Rooney’s mind. He felt his resolve go out like a hard-blown candle.

God help us, he thought, feeling for the first time the true weight of that three-word plea.

The killing has started.

Chapter 58

WHAT THE HELL IS THIS? How could it have happened?

With his back flat against one of the cathedral’s sequoia-thick marble columns, Jack gripped his nine millimeter and listened closely.

He’d been walking the perimeter when a figure in black had bolted out from the gift shop entrance. Thinking that the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team had somehow breached the church’s interior, he’d drawn his pistol and fired.

They’d gotten in somehow, Jack thought. There had to be some angle he and the Neat Man had missed. He waited for the sound of a boot falling against marble. For whispered orders. He scanned himself for the red dot of a laser sight, which would mean, essentially, that he was dead.

“What happened?” Little John said, arriving down the center aisle with two men at a run. A grenade was in one hand, his own nine millimeter in the other.

“Man in black just popped out of the gift shop. I don’t think it was Will Smith. Think I hit him, though.”

“Feds?” Little John whispered, glancing up at the stained-glass windows. “How?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said, peeking around the column. “There’s a body down by the baptismal font. I’ll take that one. You guys check the gift shop. Shoot first.”

The men split up and rushed toward the front of the church. Jack swung his body out into the aisle, pistol trained on the figure on the marble floor. It didn’t move.

He tapped the warm barrel of his gun hard against his forehead when he saw who it was he’d shot. What have I done?